


an analysis of the tell-tale heart

by braexm (orphan_account)



Category: Kiznaiver
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Jossed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 13:09:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6659374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/braexm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That’s correct—Maki Honoka can speak to ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	an analysis of the tell-tale heart

On good days, she only sees it when she closes her eyes. Purple in the middle, with a halo of yellow stretching into soft skin. Pretty gold bruises across a pretty neck.

She crosses her legs under her desk. Eyes closed. Dead. Eyes open. _On line one, write the coordinates of the vertices._ In one ear, a student taps his pencil. It’s irritating, but she won’t deign to respond.

The images rarely managed to shake her composure. A four-limbed figure at the bottom of a riverbed; an artery lodged with lead alloy; purple-yellow fingerprints indenting the underside of a sallow jaw; a paisley scarf, double knotted, tight enough to constrict the airways; a lavender bob-cut set around sunkens eyes; slack lips, incoherent but the name: _Maki. Maki. Honoka_.

That’s correct—Maki Honoka can speak to ghosts.

(The images rarely managed to shake her composure, but the _sounds_ were another story.)

Like— 

She walks home from school. She carries an aura of disdain around her like a raincloud; that is to say, it dampens the surroundings. This is perhaps why she doesn’t first notice the house burning at her left.

She’d have passed it if it weren’t for the orange glare in the corner of her glasses. Then she turns, face-to-face with smoldering heat; it’s perfectly isolated, in its little plot of land, tall flames wedged between two fences in a way that was clearly unlike any fire she’d seen or read about. It would take the surrounding buildings by now, certainly; no, it isn’t greedy enough to be real.

In the top window, three stories up, she sees a desperate, pleading face. 

There are a mortifying few moments where she doesn’t realize she’s hallucinating—the girl with the face in the window, that is; the fire was an obvious trick. Then the moments pass, and she straightens her back and turns away, pretending she’d simply been eyeing the architecture.

Four blocks after, a distant crackle sends shivers down her spine.

Or— 

She’s eating dinner. She remembers that much. It’s hard to concentrate on the details, though, with those sunken eyes staring at her from across the table, so carefully blank. The girl takes a cup first between her delicate, loose-skinned fingers, then her delicate, loose-skinned lips, and tips back.

 _It’s poison_ , Honoka says; she rolls it over in her mouth until it’s bleeding on her tongue. _It’s poison. That’s poisoned. You are going to get poisoned_.

 _You are going to die_.

There are better ways to do that, she imagines, than convulsing on the floor until your heart gives out. Literally imagines, in this case. At least a crushed skull is instantaneous. Messy, true, but there’s no need to clean up something that only happened in her head.

There are worse ways, too. A bullet anywhere but the heart or the head, leading to bleed-out. She wonders, when you get shot, if you can actually feel the bullet inside you.

Bleeding is silent, though, and tonight, so is the convulsing. She’d count her blessings, but she doesn’t believe in something so petty.

Or— 

The paisley scarf, again. She doesn’t know why she still keeps it in her closet, except this irrational idea that something horrible will happen if she gets rid of it. It’d make a nice noose. She’s seen it function as one dozens of times. Such a thing technically aligns with its intended purpose.

She has a breathing fixation. Hands pressed on either side of a pillow, the night quiet but for rustling sheets and aborted gasps. A body packed under three metric tons of soil, mouth open to swallow, throat packed up like a flower pot. A drop of cyanide in a cup of tea, leading to hypoxia—suffocation on the smallest scale imaginable.

Or— 

Maki Honoka is above manual labor. Requiring her to help move boxes between classrooms for today’s clean-up is one thing; requiring her to navigate an endless ascent of stairs, just to get some useless oddities out of a random teacher’s way, is another thing altogether.

On the roof, in the biting air, she sets the boxes in the storage shed and locks them away with a click. She looks over the edge, down at the school’s entrance. The definition of absurdity: the fact that she’ll have to climb back down those awful stairs in a few minutes, just to get to a place that’s already in her direct line of vision.

She hooks one finger around the chainlink fence, and imagines herself on the other side of it.

It’s ridiculous, but she can’t help but think it’d be an easier trip down.


End file.
